The seven Houston children reportedly abandoned in Nigeria by their adoptive mother had been telling people their story, but no one believed them until a visiting missionary found them and helped bring them home.

Now officials with Child Protective Services say it is the mother's story that is under question.

The woman told CPS officials in March that she had left the children with her mother in Houston while she underwent cancer treatment in Shreveport, La.

In truth, she had taken the children last October to Nigeria, where a relative of her fiance lived, and enrolled them in school, said Estella Olguin, Harris County CPS spokeswoman. About a month later, she returned to Houston. This April she went to Iraq as a civilian food-service worker.

Her children ended up in an orphanage after their tuition money stopped and the relative apparently deserted them at a home.

"Those are just some of the things we now know that she hasn't been honest to us about," Olguin said. "So it's hard for us to know what she is being honest about. Did she really send them to Nigeria so they could go to school? Did she send them there with the intention of never coming back? We just don't know."

The Chronicle is not naming the woman because she has not been charged with a crime. Attempts to speak with her by telephone and at a Houston address where she was thought to live were unsuccessful Tuesday.

The three boys and four teenage girls ranging in age from 8 to 16 returned to Houston on Friday after Warren Beemer, a youth pastor from a San Antonio, church found them in the orphanage.

Dreaming of Houston The children told Beemer they had despaired of ever getting home to Houston. They had told the story of being abandoned by their adoptive mother so many times to so many other other people, he said.

Beemer took their photographs and had them write their names on notepads.

"I promised them they would be going home," he said in a telephone interview from his church Tuesday. "I said, 'Guys, in no uncertain terms, you will be going home.' "

Beemer said they cheered up as they talked about how much they liked the Dallas Cowboys and Houston Rockets center Yao Ming. They jeered when he mentioned the Los Angeles Lakers and clapped when he told them Shaquille O'Neal had been traded to the Miami Heat. Then, he said, they put their hands over their hearts and sang the national anthem.

Olguin said Tuesday that the Harris County CPS was concentrating on getting medical and psychological care for the children and getting them enrolled in school.

Upon their return to Houston, three of the children were treated for malaria at a local hospital and released.

Since then, the three boys have been placed in one foster home and the girls placed in another.

Stories don't match Olguin said the adoptive mother told CPS workers she had taken the children to Nigeria to attend a boarding school suggested by her fiance. The children told CPS they never stayed at a boarding school, but lived in a shack while going to school.

The mother said she had called the children two or three times a week while they were living in Nigeria, Olguin said. The kids told caseworkers she only called once, Feb. 14.

"This is someone who is not being honest with everything she is telling us, so there is a lot of investigative work to do," Olguin said.

The woman had been receiving $512 a month from CPS for each of her seven adopted children because, as minority siblings wishing to stay together, they were considered to have special needs that made them hard to adopt.

Four of the children were adopted from the Houston CPS in 1996, while three were adopted from the Dallas CPS in 2001.

Houston CPS cut off funds to the woman in March when they learned the children were not living with her.

Dallas CPS spokeswoman Marissa Gonzales said the state continued to pay her for the three children adopted in Dallas. She said she did not know why.

"We are still looking through a lot of our documents right now," she said.

The woman, who divorced in 1990, was approved for the adoptions after passing home studies conducted by Spaulding for Children, a nonprofit child welfare agency in Houston, Olguin said.

Spaulding spokeswoman Kirstin Joel would not comment on the case, citing confidentiality rules.

Joel, however, said the agency always does a complete home evaluation and supervises the adopting family's visitations with the children before they are placed in the home. Once in the home, she said, the agency continues to monitor the family for a minimum of six months before the adoption can be formalized.

The agency does not stay involved after the adoption is complete.

'No magic number' Joel and Olguin said it is not out of the ordinary to place as many as seven children with a single parent who is seeking to adopt them.

"There is no magic number of who can handle what," Joel said. "It's very much an individual decision made on the part of the professionals involved, Child Protective Services and the families involved and what kind of support structure they have."

The woman's Houston neighbors said the adoptive mother had been living at a boarding house for a least a year in their neighborhood. They said she drove a late-model Mercedes-Benz.

Beemer said he hopes to reunite with the children soon. He hasn't contacted CPS officials about that, but said once the children adjust to their new lives, he will try to set up a meeting.

TIMELINE  1996 : Woman adopts four siblings in Houston  2001: The woman adopts three other siblings in Dallas  October 2003 : The adoptive mother takes the seven children to Nigeria. The children reportedly are enrolled in school. Mother returns to Houston about 30 days later.  April : Mother goes to Iraq as a civilian food service staffer  July 28 : Nigerian social service workers are tipped to the children living in squalor in a home. They are placed in an orphanage.  Aug. 4 : Warren Beemer, youth pastor for Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, discovers the children on a goodwill tour of the orphanage in Ibadan, Nigeria. He alerts his church officials, who call U.S. authorities.  Aug. 13 : Children arrive on a commercial airliner at Bush Intercontinental Airport from Nigeria at 1:30 p.m. They are placed in foster homes.  Aug.16 : Emergency hearing in Houston grants Child Protective Services temporary custody of the children.  Aug. 26 : A custody hearing is scheduled.

dale.lezon@chron.com

KHOU-Channel 11 contributed information for the origination of this story.

Houston CPS cut off funds to the woman in March when they learned the children were not living with her.

Apparently it didn't occur to Houston CPS to contact police and the FBI about 4 missing children!

The woman, who divorced in 1990, was approved for the adoptions after passing home studies conducted by Spaulding for Children, a nonprofit child welfare agency in Houston, Olguin said.

Lemme guess: this outfit gets paid a fee for each home it approves.

'No magic number' Joel and Olguin said it is not out of the ordinary to place as many as seven children with a single parent who is seeking to adopt them.

Of course not. Why would it be, when all CPS cares about it collecting their bonus for getting children "adopted"?

Newt Gingrich was right. We need orphanages, and we need them urgently. It's time to stop propagating the lie that there are plenty of adoptive homes available for all the kids who need them. And the "pro-life" movement needs to recognize and end its complicity in the spread of this lie.

And the Texas CPS official is wondering "Did she really send them to Nigeria so they could go to school? ... We just don't know." Uh huh, sure, it's quite plausible that the adoptive "mother" felt it was important that her children leave Texas in order to take advantage of the superior educational opportunities available in Nigeria. < /s>

These CPS people are just as much "welfare queens" as the loser who adopted 7 kids for the checks and dumped them in a 3rd World country. They're all living on taxpayer money while claiming to be taking care of children, when really they're doing nothing of the sort.

Its still common in Texas for foster placements and adoptions to be protested for racial differences (black children removed from Caucasian homes, Hispanic children removed from Black homes, etc). One of the biggest heartbreaks I witnessed as a foster parent was seeing 4 little Hispanic sisters being removed from a very warm and loving and stable home of two retired black school teachers, the only parents that the two youngest girls had ever known. The protest was filed by their uncle, who sucked up their money for two months after their removal, and then abandoned them at the very steps of the local CPS office. They were placed in a group home and grew up angry and unattached.

To be truthful, it yopu had 7 kids and made $43K per year, you probably would pay very little if any income tax. However you WOULD pay SS and Mediscare tax of about $3000.

But at this point my heart goes out to the children. I cannot imagine how abandoned and forgotten they must have felt in a country thousands of miles from home and completely without hope. Just reading the story makes me want to grab them all and pull them close and tell them that it is all over and they will be taken care of now by people who really do love them.

Thank God that He sent those missionaries to that orphanage to rescue those children.

13
posted on 08/18/2004 11:52:07 AM PDT
by Blood of Tyrants
(Even if the government took all your earnings, you wouldn't be, in its eyes, a slave.)

How did I know she was getting a fat monthly check for each and every one of these kids. Dumping them in Nigeria was a great idea from her point of view. She'd never have to spend a penny on them. Nobody would check up on her...she was home free. Too bad that missionary found them. The woman should be jailed for years. Child endangerment, abandonment, stealing, a whole host of charges.

I guess the point that I failed to make is that there are alot of empty foster homes in Texas, but for some reason CPS is still reluctant to place children in homes of enthic differences. As soon as a placement is protested, they will do the kid scramble rather than go thru the headache of a court procedure. In my county, where the majority of kids in the system are white, its not uncommon for black foster homes to be empty for months at a time. Its a travesty.

These CPS people are just as much "welfare queens" as the loser who adopted 7 kids for the checks and dumped them in a 3rd World country. They're all living on taxpayer money while claiming to be taking care of children, when really they're doing nothing of the sort.

Very observant and very well said.

17
posted on 08/18/2004 1:06:24 PM PDT
by tdadams
(If there were no problems, politicians would have to invent them... wait, they already do.)

Yep. In Nigeria. Sharing a cell with each and every CPS worker who contibuted to this mess, and each and every culpable staffer of the agency that conducted the "home study" and took a fee for asserting that this scam artist was fit to adopt children.

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